Water Conditions — Average water levels and clear.
 
Fishing Conditions  — The last few weeks have been excellent with lots of spawn and pre-spawn fish in the entire system.  The fishing is still very good.  We’ve heard some reports of large numbers of fish moving through the lower
river… this should predict good fishing for a while yet.
 
Tip:  Big bold flies equal better bites for kings with less foul hooked fish, if they won’t bite than at least they’ll get out of the way.

This article "The Carp of Beaver Island" by Brandon Butler appeared in Midwest Fly Fishing in the October 2008 issue.  Midwest Fly Fishing is a great regional publication, you can check out their web site at… Midwest Fly Fishing (www.mwfly.com).

The Carp of Beaver Island

Brandon Butler with a carp hooked on the flats near Beaver Island.      photo/ Kevin Morlock

     Walking up the ramp of the Emerald Isle for the trip from Charlevoix, Mich., to Lake Michgian’s Beaver Island, anticipation gave way to acceptance.  Month after month had been crossed off my calendar as I awaited the arrival of the 4th of July expedition.
     In the back of my mind, I had questioned the rational if driving more than 500 miles to fly fish for carp — after all, they’re the same fish that swim a stone’s throw from my home in Indiana.  But I had been told by a trusted guide that the experience would be one I would never forget.  So as the ship’s engines began to rumble, I settled back to see what would happen.
     After the two-hour, 32-mile ferry ride to the tiny town of St. James on the island, it was clear that the experience I would never forget would be an adventure, as well.  The island is about 13 miles long and 6 miles wide, about 54 square miles in area.  A weathered, old lighthouse greets travelers to the island, and the harbor moors only a handful of boats.  In the marina parking lot, friends and family awaited the Isle’s arrival.  My guide-to-be, Kevin Morlock, was among them.
     Kevin is a well-known salmon and steelhead guide on the rivers of western Michigan.  When we met a few years back, the crossing of kindred souls was obvious.  In the years since, we have fished together numerous times.
     After a quick tour of Main Street in St. James, we headed to the campground where Kevin stayed for the summer.  It was located on a high bluff, overlooking the waters of Lake Michigan.  The horizon was dotted with the uninhabited islands of Trout, Whiskey, Garden and Hog.  From this vantage point, Kevin, while taking his morning coffee, could scout carp feeding on the sand flats below.  For the sake of simplicity, I had left my tent at home and rigged a hammock between two trees where the wind would rock me and the waves would serenade at the end of a hard day’s night.
     I’m not a morning person, so when Kevin told me carp fishing improves as the day progresses, I was pleased.  We shuffled around our camp the first morning and discussed strategy while waiting for the sun to warm the water.
     Kevin fishes from a flats boat, 17 feet long with a 40-horse motor.  It had a platform in back from which he could pole us toward carp without a sound.
     Like most of us who have Champaign dreams and beer budgets, I have longed for but have never been able to afford saltwater adventures.  The idea of a steelheading maestro, perched atop a platform, pushing me around in search of tailing carp in the northern most reaches of America, was inspiring.
     We launched the boat off the eastern shore of the island and headed for the southern tip.  The water temperatures we took on the main lake were in the low 60s; too cold for aggressive carp.  Kevin expected the water would be warmer in the south bays, inviting pods of carp to gather in the shallow water.
     I never thought this trip would change my perception of a species I knew so little about, but as we watched carp after carp cruising the outer lip of the flats, i found them irresistible.  Back home in Indiana, people shoot carp with bow and arrow and trow their carcasses away.  Seeing these finicky, beautiful beasts cruising crystal-clear water in search of food is something else.
     We moored the boat in a few feet of water and began to approach the shallows where the fish were feeding.  The water temperature here was 70 degrees, perfect for feeding fish.
     Kevin was on a mission this summer to catch as many carp as he could because he is tagging caught fish to track their movements in Lake Michigan.  A biologist at heart, he enjoys the science of the experience as much as the catching.  I left him to his own pod and set out down the beach in search of more fish.  They weren’t hard to locate, and a group of feeding fish appeared before me as a dark streak across the clear water.
     I slipped up behind a large bolder 50 feet or so from a pod of a half-dozen carp.  Kevin had warned me to get the fly close to the feeding fish, into an area as wide as a basketball hoop.  Their eyesight, he said, is poor and they rarely chase flies aggressively.
     Seeing so many carp around me, I figured these fish would be easy to catch, but they are not.  I worked this little pod for nearly and hour, before finally, a fish took.  The moment is still fresh in my mind.  I was growing anxiously annoyed, when I targeted a carp on the outskirts of the pod.  The cast was a few feet beyond the fish, perfect for allowing my goby imitation time to sink the necessary two feet.  As I strip-stripped the minnow along the bottom, allowing for a pause just in front of the fish’s face, I watched with amazement as its bugle-mouth opened and inhaled my fly.  Somehow I kept my excitement in check and executed a solid hook set.  The fight was on.
     As the thirty-inch fish ran for deep water, I slightly tightened my drag.  We struggled back and forth for 15 minutes before I finally brought the magnificent fish to hand.  In awe, I caressed the sided of the fish and released it with a new-found respect for such a maligned species.
     Fatigued suddenly and pensive, I crawled onto a nearby boulder and listened to the sounds of waves breaking on the shoreline of Beaver Island and the wind from the great lake around me.

Brandon Butler is a syndicated outdoor writer from Bloomington, Ind.  Contact him through his website www.driftwoodoutdoors.org.

Beaver Island Chamber of Commerce web site…

The article "It’s clear:  Underrated carp offers game-fishing challenge" by Eric Sharp appeared in the Detroit Free Press on July 24th, 2008.

It’s clear:  Underrated carp offers game-fishing challenge

     Beaver Island — If you showed a picture of this place to an experienced saltwater angler, he’d almost certainly say it was taken in the Florida Keys or somewhere else in the tropics.
     On a virtually windless day, the surface was flat and the water so clear that every pebble was visible on the bottom 20 feet below.
     And as Kevin Morlock eased his skiff onto a shallow flat where the water was about three feet deep, we saw a couple of long, dark shapes that moved over the bottom while the black

shadows cast by underwater rocks stayed still.
     The moving shapes were good-sized examples of America’s most underrated game fish, a species that lends itself to stalking and sight fishing just like stalking bones in the Keys — the noble carp.
     There probably is no place in world better suited to this kind of fishing than northern lakes Michigan and Huron.  And the Beaver Island archipelago, a cluster of islands 10-30 miles off the northwest tip of the Lower Peninsula, may well offer the best of the best.
     "The conditions really look good," fishing guide Kevin Morlock said as we ran across Lake Michigan toward a flat on the south side of Garden Island about three miles from Beaver Island’s St. James Harbor.  "This is the lightest wind we’ve had for weeks.  Most of this summer, the seas have been running three or four feet."
     Sight fishing on clear, shallow flats requires accurate casting whether the target is carp, bonefish, tarpon or redfish.  For carp and bonefish, the key is placing the fly or jig close enough to the fish’s heads that they can see it but far enough away that it doesn’t spook them.
     "A lot of anglers don’t understand that casting to these fish isn’t like casting to a trout or salmon and letting the fly drift down to it.  If you don’t put the fly in the teacup, you don’t have much chance of getting a take," said Morlock, who owns Indigo Guide Service on the Pere Marquette River out of Walhalla, fishing that river from the start of the mid-August salmon run through the steelhead runs in winter and spring.
     The more sight casting you do, the better you get.  I had made only one previous sight-casting trip this summer, mostly because the weather has been unsuitable, so I bungled some casts and scared off fish.
     But I also made a number of very good casts only to see the carp ignore flies that passed within inches of their eyes.
     "This is what I ran into a couple of days ago," Morlock said.  "I kept changing flies, but they wouldn’t take anything we offered."
     Morlock agreed with my observation that carp cruising along in a straight line at high speed will rarely turn to investigate a lure.  It’s obvious that they’re on a mission and won’t be sidetracked.
     So we were both surprised a little later when I made a Hail Mary cast at a carp cruising by at six knots and the fish stopped on a dime, turned and began following the fly.  The carp was almost touching the crayfish pattern with its nose, and while it followed the lure for 40 feet, it wouldn’t bite and turned off as soon as it saw the boat.
     "I think what happens is that when we get wind changes like we’ve had for the past couple of days, it takes the fish some time to settle down to a new (feeding) pattern,"  Morlock said.  "I like to see the wind come steadily out of one direction for a couple of days.  When we get that, I know where to find them, and they seem to feed a lot more eagerly."
     British anglers have a mantra:  Follow the wind.  They look for bays and points where the wind concentrates food.  Morlock is also so an adherent of that theory and said, "You want to find the gnarliest points and fish around them.  In summer, that’s where the currents pile up the warmest water."
     Morlock’s average day:  dozens or even hundreds of fish sighted, 12-15 hooked up and five-10 landed and released.
     This day was one of the few when the fish were widely scattered and wouldn’t touch anything we offered.  But it was far from a total loss because we got to experience one of the most exceptional fishing experiences that Michigan offers, in a place that few people realize exists.
     Most people who visit the islands arrive aboard a Beaver Island Boat co. ferry that makes the 33-mile trip from Charlevoix in about two hours ($46 round-trip).  Another option is a 20-minute flight on Island Airways ($86 round-trip).  The ferry also carries cars and boat trailers.

Beaver Island Chamber of Commerce
Beaver Island Boat Company
Island Airways
Fresh Air Aviation

This article appeared in the HeraldTimes along with several other newspapers around July 13, 2008 and was written by Brandon Butler.

When considering typical fish pursued by those armed with a fly rod, the common carp is rarely one of the first to come to mind. Unfortunately considered by most to be nothing more than rough fish, carp are in actuality hard fighting, highly intelligent, large-sized fresh water fish worthy of respect. I recently traveled to Beaver Island in northern Lake Michigan to pursue these "bone-fish of the north" with fly fishing gear.

This past spring, in between releasing steelhead during a great day on the river, my good friend and well-known Michigan fly fishing guide Kevin Morlock, of Indigo Guide Service, asked me if I was interested in trying something new. From the smile on his face, I knew it would be good. When Kevin invited me to join him on a carp fishing expedition I began to think all those days on the water had finally caught up with him.   

Always a sucker for adventure, I pulled into Charlevoix, Michigan at about noon in plenty of time to catch the 2:30 ferry. Situated approximately 30 miles off lower-Michigan’s mainland (about a 2 hour and 15 minute ferry ride), Beaver Island awaits those looking to get away from it all. When I first stepped off the ferry, I was pleasantly surprised. Having traveled to Mackinac Island numerous times before, I supposed I expected Beaver to be similar. There were no fudge shops, no horse drawn carriages, and most importantly, no lodges requiring a suit jacket at dinner! Beaver Island is rustic and remote, yet completely satisfying. There is one grocery store, a few restaurants and bars, two marinas, a golf course, and 42 miles of beautiful Lake Michigan shoreline.

Kevin Morlock has come up with an innovative idea for fishing the crystal clear, aqua colored waters surrounding the Island. The innovation simply comes from applying ocean flats fishing to the northern waters of Michigan. Kevin has mounted a platform on the rear of his 17′ boat and uses a 20′ push pole to quietly maneuver around the flats in search of cruising carp. When carp are located in a pod, Kevin anchors the boat so a stealthy approach can be made on foot. The sand and gravel flats are at times only ankle deep a quarter-mile of the shore. I swear, if there had been a tiki-hut, with a bartender offering me a Red Stripe, ‘mon, I would have thought I’d finally realized my dream of Jamaica.

The fishing was much tougher than I thought it would be. In two days on the water, I boated 3 and Kevin 7. The wind was ferocious, so Kevin said we did well considering the conditions. He was a little upset that we didn’t get into them the way he is used to; when twenty fish days are common. We used 8 wt. and 10 wt. rods, with weight forward floating line, and 7 foot leaders tapered to 12 lbs. The carp took a variety of flies imitating crayfish, gobies, and leaches. Go ahead and hold the dough ball and corn jokes. We got plenty of them our first day on the island!

If you are interested in a true Midwestern adventure, head to the wilderness of Beaver Island. Be careful though, the locals warn, "You’ll get sand in your shoes!"

Brandon Butler is a professional outdoor communicator living in Bloomington, Indiana with his wife and two daughters. He is a member of the Outdoor Writers Association of America, the Association of Great Lakes Outdoor Writers, and the Hoosier Outdoors Writers. Brandon writes a weekly outdoor column for almost a dozen newspapers and has been featured in many outdoor publications. You can contact Brandon from his Web site at

www.driftwoodoutdoors.org

This article is also on the Pure Michigan web site…

Click here to visit the In-Fisherman site, it has an endless amount of top-notch information.

Timely Strategies For Salmon & Steelhead — Great Lakes Rivermouths by Jason Daley and Kevin Morlock can out in the summer of 2008.

Click here to view the article…